Merits and Demerits of Environmental Criminology in Data Mining (Essay Sample)

Merits and Demerits of ‌‍‍‍‌‌‍‍‌‌‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‌‌‍Environmental Criminology theories in Data Mining
Introduction
Environmental criminology refers to the theoretical framework encompassing different perspectives from modern criminology that explains the circumstances through which criminal incidents happen. It traces its roots to the earliest work in geography crime in the 1800s to the evolution of the modern strategies of preventing crimes. Some factors that can influence criminal activities include geography, time, offender, space, and victim. Without one of the components mentioned above, an incident would not constitute a crime. While it is evident that these components need to exist together for an incident to be a crime, scholars have always tried to study them separately (Snaphaan and Hardyns 2021). This paper examines the advantages and disadvantages of utilizing​‌‍‍‍‌‌‍‍‌‌‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‌‌‍​Environmental Criminology theories in data mining
Advantages of Environmental Criminology Theories in Data Mining
Data mining is a technique of extracting information usually out of a large set of data (Farsi et al. 2018). In environmental criminology, the technique employs artificial intelligence methods to extract meaningful information that can help prevent crimes. The high volume of crime data has made criminology the right field to apply data mining (Ozkan 2019). There are many benefits of employing environmental criminology theories in data mining.
First, environmental criminology data mining helps to identify risky places. In most cases, security agencies cannot stop crimes because they do not have a good understanding of the crime location (Zhao and Tang 2018). Notably, this is a problem that environmental crime data mining can quickly stop by making the security agencies aware of the places that they should be vigilant about when conducting their research. For instance, many crimes in contemporary society occur in entertainment zones and at night. Fortunately, the advancement of technologies such as smartphones makes it easy for criminology researchers to observe the public spaces and extract the information that can prove significant in fighting crimes (Bannister et al. 2019).